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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25293481">Battery acid love</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov'>Baryshnikov</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Confident Harry Potter, Love, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Power Dynamics, Sexual Tension, Slytherin Harry Potter, what is love?</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 05:47:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,892</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25293481</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom can't stop thinking about Harry, fortunately for him, Harry can't stop thinking about him either.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Harry Potter/Tom Riddle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>200</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Battery acid love</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Forgive me, this is awful.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Could you love someone so much—so brutally—that you could be torn apart from the inside out? Could love rip your heart right out of your chest? Tom certainly thought you could. Especially right now as he lay awake, his eyes were burning and there was an ache in his jaw. For too long he’d been staring at the unfathomable blackness of the ceiling waiting for something to happen, waiting for a moment of clarity, for the world to crystallise and reveal the pattern of things.</p><p>He just wanted this endless nervousness that was rolling inside his stomach—turning itself over and over, tumbling around and around—to put itself to rest so that he could go back to the way that things had been before he did something as stupid as falling in love.  </p><p>Around the room were the noises of other people sleeping; the shifting of duvets and the soft flutters of lungs functioning—it should have been calming, a soothing sound that lulled him into sleep, but tonight it wasn’t. Tonight, such noises were merely agitators. They rubbed against Tom’s skin and made him turn over and over, but no matter how many times he shifted or what position he took, everything felt scratchy—the covers dragging over the skin at his shoulder, his pillowcase grating into his cheek, even his insides were prickling. </p><p>And then there were his thoughts, that tonight took the form of great racing things—beasts, by any other name—they rampaged through his head, leaving his brain trampled and sore. He buried the back of his head further into the pillow and put his hand to the front as though he could press away the problem—force it out of him—with mere strength. </p><p>It didn’t work. And so, his hands continued to clench themselves into fists and his palms continued to itch and he continued to suffocate in the abundance of oxygen that pressed itself so aggressively into his lungs. </p><p>Outside his own bed, Tom could hear the distinct sound of someone else’s curtain being pulled back across their bed, the hooks that attached it sliding—scraping—across the wood. It made his heart pick up and his pulse tremor for reasons he didn’t want to examine but <em>had</em> to acknowledge. The sound was followed by the weight of someone walking over the floor, the pace of their footfall easy to pick out in the silence, and Tom was pained to know that he recognised the pace; there were few people who walked with such a purpose, whose footsteps were as deliberate—almost clumsy—as Harry Potter’s.</p><p>Tom swallowed and turned onto his side. A man was allowed to wake up in the night and move about the room, he didn’t need to have a reason for such activities, and yet, he found himself <em>dying</em> to know why Harry felt the need to move. Just as he <em>needed</em> to know everything else about Harry. Even now, when he was on the other side of the room, Tom could feel the need in the thrumming of his heart, and in the jittering of his legs, and in all the other awful symptoms of love that Malfoy had so zealously diagnosed him with. </p><p><em>It’s perfectly natural</em>, Malfoy had said with that slight smugness twinging at his tone. Maybe Tom would have believed him, except, this didn’t feel natural at all; in fact, this was the most artificial sensation that Tom had ever experienced. From the way that his insides prickled, and his fingers trembled, and even the smallest moments between him and Harry seemed to set off monumental reactions, this was as far from <em>normal</em> as it was possible to get. </p><p>But Tom couldn’t help himself. </p><p>For, despite all its faults, love was the most compulsive thing he’d ever experienced, and every time he looked at Harry, he got another hit of this <em>thing</em> washing through his bones, stretching out his blood vessels and sliding down his spine. Every time their shoulders touched, or their hands met in the guise of fraternal intimacy, Tom couldn’t help the bumps and spikes of pleasure that seemed to work their way into his stomach and burn holes in his stomach like battery acid. </p><p>It was both a horrible and a brilliant feeling like your insides were being murdered, but the murderer was your own brain, and he couldn’t get enough of it. That feeling of being plunged into the great unknown was fucking horrifying and sometimes it made him want to hold Harry down and scream into his mouth until he was hoarse, but there were other times too when his eyes met Harry’s across the room and his stomach swung low and every thought inside his head dissolved into a pink sugar-coated mess, that made Tom feel sick with want.</p><p>So, he stayed on his side, his legs pressed together, and his hands clenched up tight against his chest, even as he heard the footfalls coming closer; a sick thrill; rising in his throat. Harry <em>knew</em>. But then again, everyone did, they all said it was painfully obvious to watch him watching Harry with the longing of an abandoned puppy (Lestrange’s words that he’d paid dearly for expressing publicly), or having to endure him when he was sleep deprived because if Tom didn’t sleep then he couldn’t dream about the way that Harry smiled at him. </p><p>He was thinking about him now. </p><p>Tom was still thinking about him when the curtain of his bed was pulled back and Harry was there, his face illuminated by the tip of his wand. Barely waiting for permission, Harry slipped into Tom’s bed and lit up the space with a musky light. Tom just stayed motionless, still curled in on himself, pretending that his insides weren’t smashing themselves to pieces like waves hitting a breakwater. </p><p>Though with every movement Harry made, Tom could feel a slight shift in the mattress; the distribution of weight altering over and over again until he felt a hand touch his shoulder. He jolted—the skin that Harry touched burning. </p><p>“Harry,” he said.</p><p>“Tom.”</p><p>Tom swallowed and sat up, the dim light carving out a space from the dark, just a hollow that they could sit in and stare at each other and pretend that this was normal. It wasn’t normal. But Tom had been expecting—wanting—it for a while, after all, it was easier to get rid of something once you acknowledged it was there, that was if he even wanted to get rid of it anymore.</p><p>But before he could muse on that for too long, Harry was leaning towards him, pressing into Tom’s space so that the only thing that Tom could feel around him was the heat radiating off Harry’s body and the soft smell of his skin at the base of his neck; Tom couldn’t even put a name to what the scent was but he’d have breathed it in forever. He swallowed again and tried to focus on something that wasn’t the tightness of his own skin or the stinging in his heart because Harry was <em>right there</em> and he wanted him so fucking much. </p><p>“You looked good today,” Harry said quietly, his hand reaching out before him to touch at Tom’s arm. Tom didn’t back away—he didn’t want to—not when his skin was tingling like this and his mouth was hot and he just wanted to kiss Harry until he suffocated.</p><p>“<em>Really</em> good,” Harry continued, still sliding forward like a snake, his knees coming to rest on either side of Tom’s thighs so that he was spread over his lap like it was the most natural thing in the world. Tom shifted, his hands behind him, the palms pressed into the mattress, supporting his weight as Harry leaned into him. Harry was looking at him. His gaze skimming over Tom’s mouth and down his neck, lingering on the collar of the shirt he wore to bed before dipping even lower. </p><p>Harry smiled. </p><p>Tom shivered even though it was far too hot in here; all the coolness of the night sucked out by Harry’s presence so that Tom felt uncomfortably damp and uncomfortably hard. He had been since he’d been thinking about Harry, and Harry must have known by the way he was shifting himself, his thighs constantly repositioning and his weight pushing forward.</p><p>But if Harry felt it, he didn’t say anything, he only slid his hand up Tom’s arm to his shoulder, watching how Tom tensed up. His back straightening out almost uncontrollably and his heart threatening to smash through his ribs like a car-crash victim through the windshield—Harry <em>must</em> have been able to feel the beats pounding out through the room threatening to raze it to the ground with each throb.</p><p>“Oh, Tommy, look at you,” Harry cooed, “you’re so worked up.” The words murmured against his ear, Harry’s voice deep and strangely distant, as though Tom was hearing but an echo of the original, as though he had died, and Harry’s voice was the last thing connecting him to real life. As he spoke, Harry stroked his fingers down the side of Tom’s neck and across the length of Tom’s shoulders. He lingered on the bone and smiled at him, all glittering and brilliant. “Is it all because of me?” he murmured, his fingertips dropping down to rub along Tom’s thigh. </p><p>Tom couldn’t help but tense up the muscles in his legs too, straightening them tightly and scrunching his toes as Harry mouthed down his neck, grazing Harry’s lips softly over the line of his collarbone.<br/>
“But you know I can make it all go away, don’t you?” Harry said quietly, pressing his fingers up higher, sliding them into the crease where his leg met his torso and following the natural line downwards “I already know how much you’re aching for it,” he added with a deliberate press of his thumb that made Tom’s entire world fold in on itself. </p><p>“Is that what you want?” he continued, still touching him with the very tips of his fingers so that Tom couldn’t help but press his hips forward and part his lips in anticipation. Frankly, all he wanted to do was wrap his legs around Harry and pull him down; make him drown with him in the unfathomable blackness of night-time until they were just skeletons with their fingers wound around each other. </p><p>“So?” Harry prompted again, as his spare hand pushed at Tom’s shoulder, easing him onto his back and shifting himself forward, deliberately dragging in his hips. When Harry was above him, there were shadows spread over his face and dipping deep into his eyes and he looked so good that it made Tom’s heart thrash too hard against his ribs, threatening to crack them in two, and he could scarcely swallow thanks to the cotton dryness of his throat.</p><p>He just nodded, his breathing tight and heavy, stretching his lungs to the edge of capacity, and Harry’s smile widened.<br/>
“Oh, believe me,” he said, leaning down so that his hair tickled Harry’s forehead, “you’re not going to regret that, Tommy,” Harry continued, though now he worked his way down so that he could press his mouth against Tom’s and kiss him as hard as he could, “not one bit.”</p>
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